Appropriating Blackness - Performance and the Politics of Authenticity

A consideration of the performance of Blackness and race in general, in relation to sexuality and critiques of authenticity.

List of contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction

"Blackness" and Authenticity: What's Performance Got to Do with It? 1

1. The Pot is Brewing: Marlon Riggs's Black Is . . . Black Ain't 17

2. Manifest Faggotry: Queering Masculinity in African American Culture 48

3. Mother Knows Best: Blackness and Transgressive Domestic Space 76

4. "Nevah Had uh Cross Word": Mammy and the Trope of Black Womanhood 104

5. Sounds of Blackness Down Under: The Cafe of the Gate of Salvation 160

6. Performance and/as Pedagogy: Performing Blackness in the Classroom 219

Appendix A Mary Rhyne's Narrative 257

Appendix B Interview with Mrs. Smith 311

Notes 315

Bibliography 345

Index 361

About the author

E. Patrick Johnson is a performance artist and Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University.

Summary

Examines the various ways that blackness is appropriated and performed - toward widely divergent ends - both within and outside African American culture. This title develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identity trope - avowed and disavowed, attractive and repellant, fixed and malleable.

Product details

• Authors: E. Patrickjohnson, Johnson, E Patrick Johnson, E. Patrick Johnson
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 13.08.2003
• EAN: 9780822331544
• ISBN: 978-0-8223-3154-4
• No. of pages: 384
• Dimensions: 159 mm x 236 mm x 30 mm
• Weight: 647 g
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Geosciences > Geography; Afrika, Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika, USA, Regionalstudien